Being, Existence, and Ontological Commitment1

Metametaphysics New Essays on the Foundations of Ontology edited by David Chalmers, David Manley, and Ryan Wasserman CLARENDON PRESS OXFORD · 1 Great Clarendon Street, Oxford ox2 6dp Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. 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ISBN 978–0–19–954600–8 (pbk.: alk. paper)—ISBN 978–0–19–954604–6 (hardback: alk. paper) 1.Ontology—Congresses.2.Metaphysics—Congresses.I.Chalmers,DavidJohn,1966–II.Manley, David. III. Wasserman, Ryan. BD311.M483 2009 110.1—dc22 2008046062 Typeset by Laserwords Private Limited, Chennai, India Printed in Great Britain on acid-free paper by CPI Antony Rowe, Chippenham, Wiltshire ISBN 978–0–19–954604–6 (Hbk.) ISBN 978–0–19–954600–8 (Pbk.) 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 16 Being, Existence, and Ontological Commitment1 PETER VAN INWAGEN 1 Ontology is a very old subject, but ‘ontology’ is a relatively new word. (Ontologia seems to have been a seventeenth-century coinage.²)Afterthe passing of the Wolff-Baumgarten school of metaphysics, and before the twentieth century, ‘ontology’ was never a very popular word, except, perhaps, among the writers of manuals of scholastic philosophy. Currently, however, the word is very fashionable, both among analytical philosophers and philosophers in the existential-phenomenological tradition. Its popularity with the former is due to Quine, and its popularity with the latter is due to Heidegger.³ Quine uses ‘ontology’ as a name for the study that attempts to answer the ‘ontological question’: What is there? Quine’s conception of this study belongs to an identifiable tradition in the history of thinking about being. Most analytical philosophers would probably point to Kant and Frege and Russell as Quine’s most important predecessors in that tradition, and would probably find its roots in the attempts of various philosophers to come to terms with the ontological argument for the existence of God. Heidegger and his followers, however, see the tradition Quine represents—but they would ¹ This essay is an adaptation of the first chapter of Being: A Study in Ontology,aworkinprogress which, if fate is kind, will one day be published by Oxford University Press. A much shorter essay, adapted from an earlier version of the first chapter of Being,waspublishedas‘Meta-ontology’in Erkenntnis 48 (1998), pp. 233–50.(‘Meta-ontology’isreprintedinPetervanInwagen,Ontology, Identity, and Modality: Essays in Metaphysics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001).) The material on Hilary Putnam’s Ethics without Ontology (see n. 28 below for publication details) is adapted from ‘What there is’, a review of that book which appeared in The Times Literary Supplement, 29 April 2005,pp.11–12. ² See the article ‘Ontology’ by Alasdair MacIntyre in The Encyclopedia of Philosophy,Vol.5,pp.542–3. ³ For a discussion of another tradition in twentieth-century philosophy that has appropriated the term ‘ontology’ to its own philosophical concerns, see the discussion of ‘B-ontology’ in the ‘Introduction’ to van Inwagen, Ontology, Identity, and Modality. being, existence, and ontological commitment 473 be unlikely to identify it by reference to Quine—as much older and more pervasive. (So pervasive, in fact, as to have been for a long time now the only tradition, its adherents being no more aware of it than a fish is of water.) According to Heidegger, who takes Hegel to mark the point of its highest development, this tradition may be summarized in three theses, which he describes as ‘prejudices’: Being is universal. (That is, being is the only category such that nothing • could possibly fall outside it.) Being is indefinable. (Since there is no more general category than being, • and definitio fit per genus proximum et differentiam specificam.) Being is self-explanatory. (Since an understanding of being pervades all • our judgments, we understand being if we understand anything at all.) (This summary is itself summarized in an incidental remark of Hegel’s: Being is the most barren and abstract of all categories.) For Heidegger, the word ‘ontology’ represents a confrontation with this tradition. The task of ‘ontology’ is to lead us back to the question, ‘What is being?’, to enable us actually to ask this question. For, owing to the current pervasiveness, the utter inescapability, of the view of being embodied in the ‘prejudices’, we are unable to ask it, since we lack the requisite concepts and habits of thought. Indeed, the tradition embodies, as one might say, a self-fulfilling prophecy: the word being is now empty in just the way the tradition says it is. The emptiness of being is an artifact of philosophy. It is, however, possible for us to come to realize this and to attempt to remedy the situation. The remedy is ‘ontology’. For Heidegger, ontology is a partly phenomenological and a partly historical study. That is, phenomenological and historical investigation can each provide us with the materials for a reopening of the question of being. Phenomenology can reopen the question of being, because, although the word ‘being’ has lost its meaning, what the Greeks were enquiring about under the rubric to on (before Plato led them astray) is present as an essential ingredient in consciousness and can be investigated phenomenologically. And, of course, since our present forgetfulness of being is the outcome of an historical process, there is the possibility that we may be able to work our way back through the history of thought—with, as Milton says, ‘backward mutters of dissevering power’,—to a point at which the question of being once more becomes open to us. It is this sort of study that Heidegger calls ‘ontological’. To ontological studies he opposes ‘ontic’ studies, studies whose objects are beings, but not beings considered as beings,thingsthatare,butonlybeingsconsideredasrepresentatives of some particular category such as ‘material object’ or ‘knowing subject’ or 474 peter van inwagen ‘theoretical entity’. The materialist, for example, tells us that there are only material objects, and tells us, perhaps, how to reduce things like thoughts that apparently belong to other categories to things in his favored category, but he tells us nothing about this ‘are’ of which that category is the only representative. (We might compare Heidegger’s disdain for the unreflectiveness of ‘merely ontic’ thinkers to the disdain some early twentieth-century moral philosophers felt for the unreflective ethical thinking of victims of ‘the naturalistic fallacy’. The materialist says that all beings are material. But, surely, his position is not that ‘a material thing’ and ‘a being’ are identical in meaning; he is not, one supposes, telling us that all material things are material things. But what, then, is the meaning of this count-noun ‘being’ whose extension is, he says, identical with the extension of ‘material thing’? He does not say. He does not know that there is anything to say.) What Quine calls ‘the ontological question’ (‘What is there?’) Heidegger would dismiss as merely the most general ontic question. It is true that Quine has said something that could be construed as an answer to the question, ‘What is being?’: ‘To be is to be the value of a bound variable.’ But, from a Heideggerian point of view, this ‘answer’ is merely a refinement of the first of the three prejudices that define the tradition of the forgetfulness of being. It is not an answer to the question but to the parody of the question that our obliviousness of being has left us with. (This obliviousness is nicely illustrated by Descartes’s use of the figure of the ‘tree of the sciences’, the roots of which are metaphysics—the most general ontic study, the study productive of theses like materialism and idealism—the trunk of which is physics, and the branches of which are the special sciences. But the roots of a real, living tree must be embedded in something. The fact that Descartes did not think it necessary to fill in the part of his figure corresponding to that aspect of a real tree suggests that—despite his preoccupation with what would one day be called the ontological argument—it had never occurred to him to ask whether there was a study that did not stop with discourse about particular sorts of beings like mental and material substances.) This essay is written from within the tradition that Heidegger proposed (as the Germans say) to overcome.

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